Baltic Finnish languages

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The Baltic Finnish languages are a subgroup of the Finno-Ugric group within the Ural language family . They are spoken in Finland , Estonia , Sweden , Norway , Latvia , Karelia , Ingermanland and around the Great Lakes and in the Tver area in northwestern Russia .

Classification of languages

The Baltic Finnish languages ​​include ten to twelve languages:

Characteristics

The Baltic Finnish languages ​​are geographically located on the western periphery of the Ural language area. Closest relatives are the Sami languages in the north and the Volga Finnish languages ​​of central Russia. From a typological perspective, Baltic Finnish has some peculiarities.

On the phonetic level , this includes the vowel and consonant quantity (the former not in Wepsi ) and the wealth of diphthongs . Consonantism is rather weak in the center of the language area, while an alignment with the Russian phoneme inventory takes place , especially in the languages ​​located to the east .

The morphology is characterized by a mixture of flective and agglutinating agents. In the context of inflection, composition and derivation, the word stems or basic lexemes are matched phonetically (so-called level change ). In general, modifying elements are added or suffused as in other Uralic languages . Prefixing and prepositioning can also be found to different degrees, but are then almost exclusively due to language contact with Indo-European languages .

The case systems are very well developed in all languages ​​and include at least 11 (Livish), but sometimes up to over twenty (Weps) case relationships. The information on this usually fluctuates more or less strongly, since the Baltic Finnish cases with the exception of nominative , genitive and the morphologically mostly not independent accusative do not express grammatical , but semantic relationships. As in other languages, these can be expressed by adpositions without changing the meaning , so that the boundary between case and structural word is fluid. A specialty of Baltic Finnish is the partitive , which is mainly used to distinguish between partial and total objects.

Language history

Baltic Finnish tribes already populated the areas around Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland in the immediate vicinity of the Baltic and Germanic tribes at the beginning of our era and are already mentioned by Tacitus in his Germania as fenni . The Baltic Finnish languages ​​were influenced by Indo-European languages from an early age . Numerous borrowings from Germanic have a primordial Germanic form that is roughly on a par with the Gothic , cf. King and Ring , Finnish kuningas and rengas , Germanic ( reconstructed ) * kuningaz and * hrengaz . In the later (separate) development of the Baltic Finnish languages, Finnish in particular repeatedly took over loanwords from different language levels of the North Germanic languages, but also from the Slavic predecessor language of Russian , which is why the Baltic Finnish languages ​​are also of great interest for Germanic and Slavic linguistic research . With the beginning of Sweden's rule over Finland , Swedish exerted further influences on Finnish, while Estonian was influenced by Low German through the Teutonic Order . More recently, the traces come from Russian, especially in the Baltic Finnish languages ​​of Russia .

The oldest known document in a Baltic Finnish language is the birch bark text No. 292 .

literature

  • Riho Grünthal: Livvistä liiviin. Itämerensuomalaiset etnonyymit. Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura , Helsinki 1997. ISBN 952-5150-00-3 .
  • Arvo Laanest: Introduction to the Baltic Finnish languages. Helmut Buske, Hamburg 1982. ISBN 3-87118-487-X .
  • Arvo Laanest: Sissejuhatus läänemeresoome keeltesse. Eesti NSV teaduste akadeemia, Keele ja kirjanduse instituut, Tallinn 1975.
  • Tuomo Tuomi (Ed.): Itämerensuomalainen kielikartasto. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura ja Kotimaisten kalten tutkimuskeskus, Helsinki 2004. ISBN 951-746-327-8 (1st part).